The market research firm said that Nintendo was able to sell 435,503 systems, compared to 294,000 units of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and 244,000 units of Sony’s Playstation 3. In December, when sales numbers were limited by Wii and PS3 supply shortages, Microsoft sold about 1.1 million consoles, Nintendo about 604,000 and Sony about 491,000.

In the race of U.S. market penetration of third generation consoles, Microsoft leads the segment with an about 4.8 million sold systems, followed by Nintendo with 1.5 million and Sony with 933,000, according to NPD. Worldwide, NexGen wars estimates, Microsoft has shipped about 10.5 million Xbox 360 units, Nintendo about 4.7 million Wiis and Sony about 1.5 million PS3s.

Nintendo claims that January Wii sales result is 70% higher than what was achieved by any other new video game system in its first January of availability during the last 10 years. The company also stated that it sold about 239,000 Nintendo DS portable consoles as well as 2.4 million software boxes during the January period.